Imitation Chandler-Flattery-Slumming... or something

“In 1986 Irish critic Seamus Deane wrote that with the appearance of John Banville’s first few novels, 'It was obvious that an important new writer had arrived, although in what his importance consisted was not clear.' Today, after 24 novels, six plays and five screenplays, it still isn’t clear. After decades of being compared to Nabokov and comparing himself to Henry James, it now seems that the greatest living high-art novelist in the English language has set his sights a bit lower. With The TBlack-Eyed Blonde, Benjamin Black – Mr. Hyde to Banville’s Dr. Jekyll — seems to have completely taken over his personality. Black has now written eight of Banville’s last 10 novels. [...]

     How good is Banville’s impersonation of [Raymond] Chandler?  See for yourself: 'Her hair was blonde and her eyes were black, black and deep as a mountain lake, the lids exquisitely tapered at their outer corners. A blonde with black eyes – that’s not a combination you get very often.'
     Rhythm, cadence, punctuation perfect.
     'Sometimes I think I should lay off cigarettes for good, but if I did that, I’d have no hobbies except chess, and I keep beating myself at chess.'
      Sardonic, not too cynical, just fine.."
— Allen Barra, Salon
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a giant in the shadows

“Perhaps you’ve heard of [Margaret] ‘Maggie’ Millar. She’s a literary suspense author who, at the onset of World War II, explored female characters as they battled the daily accretions of frustrated ambition and blocked power, often while trying to keep a grip on their own sanity.
     Later, in the 1960s, Maggie’s perspective expanded, and she delved into the mores and corruptions of a stratified society that resembles our own today. She dissected the delusions of the Golden State at a time when the rest of the country still believed in the eternal sunshine of the Edenic kind. The people who lived in this paradise, and lived in Millar’s fiction, often reached far beyond their financial or moral means, playing dangerous games that pitted loved ones against each other. Sometimes, these people escaped the law, but they always wound up serving some sort of life sentence.
     Maggie, who spent much of her life in Santa Barbara, ranks among the best fiction writers of the late 20th century. She was a master of character, a genius of plot twists, and a superb stylist. It’s rare to find those three talents in one literary package, yet, over the course of a 55-year-long career, Maggie maintained her high standards throughout her 27 books, short stories, half a dozen screenplays, poems, radio stories, and one touching memoir. Plus, she did it while struggling to raise a child, keep a house, and deal with a husband who later became more famous than she.
     Perhaps you’ve heard of Ken Millar. He wrote under the pseudonym of Ross Macdonald and created the Lew Archer detective series, which paid homage to the hard-boiled detective masters Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler, and he eventually joined them in that genre’s pantheon of men.
     Maggie was never included in that group, which annoyed her greatly.”
 — Los Angeles Review of Books
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See a related post here…

Buy all of Margaret Millar's books here...

Yours affectionately,

"Detective novelist Raymond Chandler's wife of 30 years, Cissy, died on December 12th, 1954 after a long and painful battle with pulmonary fibrosis during which the author wrote The Long Goodbye.
     As can be seen in the following touching and affectionate letter, written to friend Leonard Russell shortly after Cissy's passing, Raymond was deeply affected by the loss of his wife, and it seems he never really recovered. Sadly, he died five years later a broken man, having attempted suicide and returned to the alcoholism she had previously helped him to avoid."
— Letters of Note
Read the letter here…

padlocked and loaded

"The Facades belongs to the same subgenre as Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn: detective novels influenced as much by Kafka as they are by Chandler.

     Generally speaking, in these novels, style and atmosphere trump plot and action, the setting is as crucial as the crime, and intertextuality is more important than investigative chops. Just as we have the collective term for the Southern Gothic, perhaps it is time to name this bastard offspring of Dashiell Hammett and Jorge Luis Borges. Hardboiled Existentialism? The Metaphysical Whoodunit? The Urban-Decay Procedural? Take your pick.
     Certainly, in its foregrounding of its setting, The Facades fits the bill. The crumbling, financially strapped city of Trude, once dubbed 'the Munich of the Midwest,' is now filled with the 'abandoned mansions of industrialists,' and boasts 'the most diverse and effective suicide lobby' in the region."
 — Jon Michaud, The New Yorker
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Buy all or any of the books mention in this post here...

"It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stainedglass window." — Raymond Chandler

Los Angeles, 1949 (from: We Had Faces Then)

"Farewell, My Lovely was published in 1940 by Raymond Chandler, the virtual inventor of the hard-boiled private detective.  It’s the second novel he wrote, and features the iconic detective Philip Marlowe.  Marlowe is not a very nice person sometimes (and one wouldn’t expect him to be, given the kind of people he has to deal with) but he’s honest, and strong, and brave to the point of foolishness.  That’s what we want in a private eye, anyway, right?
     [...] Even though Chandler finally pieces the puzzle together in a highly satisfactory way, one doesn’t read him merely for the story itself. His method of storytelling, along with his turns of phrase and imagery are as equally compelling as the plot itself."— TIME ENOUGH AT LAST
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For a history of Los Angeles (and California), check out this series by Kevin Starr: Americans and the California Dream, which includes the previously published Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915, and Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era. The next installment is The Dream Endures: California through the Great Depression. From Oxford University Press

Get books by Raymond Chandler and Kevin Starr here...

Hardboiled with a soft centre

"Richard Hallas was a pseudonym for Eric Knight, an Englishman otherwise known, surprisingly enough, for penning the lachrymose novel Lassie Come-Home. Crossing continents as well as genres, Knight would only publish one hardboiled novel [...]. One can’t help but wonder how Knight could write a saccharine tale about a faithful dog, and, virtually at the same time, a hardboiled novel filled with murder, robbery, gambling, blackmail, scams, and suicide. Even more perplexing is the harsh critical reaction he received for You Play the Black [and the Red Comes Up]."
     [...] Whether thanks to Lassie or to his service record, Knight had attained such fame that Peter Hurd (Andrew Wyeth’s brother-in-law) painted his portrait. In it, Knight stands against a mountain range, wearing a blue shirt and a pencil moustache. He looks like an emaciated Errol Flynn. The portrait isn’t featured in any reference work for noir fiction. Nor does it hang in any World War II museum. Instead, it adorns a website devoted to — you guessed it — border collies, above a picture of a sculpture Knight himself carved of his favorite canine. In the biography and bibliography that accompany the images, You Play the Black is conspicuous by its absence."
— Woody Haut, Los Angeles Review of Books

(Woody Haut is the author of Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War; Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction; and Heartbreak and Vine: the Fate of Hardboiled Writers in Hollywood, all published by Serpent’s Tail.)
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"Hard-boiled is attitude. Attitude to the core. It’s also a lot more. Some may think it’s only fiction about violence, often very brutal violence, but that’s not a necessary ingredient. Violence is there because we’re talking about realistic crime fiction when we talk hard-boiled, and that means you lay it out truthfully to the reader. Don’t sugarcoat the truth, don’t play it cute. The attitude comes from realizing that truth. No matter how truly rotten or violent it may be. Knowledge of that truth can not help but effect the writer, or his characters, and if done well, the reader as well." — Gary Lovisi, Gryphon Books
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For books by Richard Hallas, Geoffrey O'Brien, Woody Haut and Harboiled Fiction writers like James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, check out Roxanne's Reflections Book & Card Shop in Fergus.